The Captain From Kirkbean

by David Weber

  He looked up once more to where Lieutenant Gaither perched in the mizzen crosstrees. Paul would have preferred to be up there himself but that would have revealed too much anxiety, and so he had to wait while Gaither peered through his telescope. It seemed to take forever, though it could actually have been no more than ten minutes before Gaither started down. He reached the deck quickly, and Paul raised an eyebrow in silent question.

  “More than half of them are still hull down to the east-sou’east, sir,” Gaither replied, “but a dozen of the line—all two-deckers, I believe—and two frigates are four or five miles east of Cape Henry. As nearly as I can estimate, their course is west-nor’west and they’re making good perhaps four knots.”

  “I see.” Paul rubbed his chin. De Grasse’s maneuvers showed more caution than he’d dared hope for. He himself would have closed with all the force he had, yet he had to admit that, properly handled, a dozen of the line would more than suffice to destroy his squadron.

  Assuming, of course, that the French knew what to do with them.

  He squinted up at the cloudless sky. The flood would continue to make for another three hours, during which the rising tide would be available to refloat a ship which touched bottom coming in. In his enemy’s place, Paul would have begun the attack the moment the tide began making, but it seemed the French had no desire to attack. Their course was for the North Channel, apparently in order the exploit the “unguarded” chink in Paul’s defenses rather than risk engaging his outnumbered, anchored ships. Yet it would take them at least three hours just to reach the channel, and when they got there …

  “Thank you, Mr. Gaither,” he said after a moment, and his cold, thin smile made the quarterdeck gunners nudge one another with confident grins. He could be a right bastard, the captain. He had a tongue that could flay a man like the cat itself, and he used it with a will. But that very sharpness lent his praise even more weight, when he gave it, and the storm or fight that could best him had never been made.

  Lieutenant Wallace Hastings of HMS Russel and his work parties had labored frantically for six days to build the battery. In fact, he’d never thought they could finish it in time, but people had a way of not disappointing Sir John. Or, at least, of not disappointing him more than once. And so now, Hastings and his gun crews—each with a core of navel gunners eked out by artillerists from Lord Cornwallis’ army—waited as another slow, thunderous broadside rippled down Russel’s side.

  Water seethed as the roundshot slashed into the sea like an avalanche. They landed far short of the thirty-six-gun frigate gliding up the North Channel under topsails and jib, but the Frenchman altered course still further towards the east to give the seventy-four a wider berth. Which just happened to bring him less than six hundred yards from Hasting’s gun muzzles.

  It had been Sir John’s idea to disguise the battery’s raw earth with cut greenery. Personally, Hastings had never expected it to work, but it seemed he’d been wrong. More probably, Russel’s ostentations efforts had riveted the French ship’s attention, distracting her lookouts from the silent shore under her lee. Whatever the explanation, she was a perfect target for Hasting’s gunners. Accustomed to the unsteadiness of a warship’s pitching deck, they’d find hitting a ship moving at barely two knots from a rock-steady battery child’s play. But Sir John’s orders had been specific, and Hastings let the frigate slide past unchallenged, then spoke to the man beside him.

  “We’ll load in ten minutes, Mr. Gray,” he told Russel’s gunner, never taking his eyes from the first French seventy-four following in the frigate’s wake.

  It was impossible for Paul to see what was happening from his position at the extreme southern end of hsi anchored formation, but eh rumble of Russel’s broadsides said his plan seemd to be working. Now if only—

  His steady pacing stopped as fresh thunder grumbled from the north.

  The twenty-four pounder lurched back, spewing flame and a stinking fogbank of smoke. Russel’s gunner had spent five minutes laying that gun with finicky precision, and Hasting’s eyes glittered as the totally unexpected shot struck below the seventy-four’s forechains and sudden consternation raged across the Frenchman’s deck. The fools hadn’t even cleared their starboard guns for action!

  Smoke wisped up as the red-hot shot blasted deep into bone-dry timbers, and panic joined consternation as the French crew realized they were under attack with heated shot. And that the British gunners had estimated their range perfectly.

  “Load!” Hastings snapped, and sweating men maneuvered shot cradles carefully, tipping fat, incandescent iron spheres down the guns’ bores. Steam hisses as they hit the water-soaked wads protecting the powder charges, and the gun crews moved with purposeful speed, making final adjustments before the sizzling iron could touch their pieces off prematurely. Hand after hand rose along the battery, announcing each gun’s readiness, and Hastings inhaled deeply.

  “Fire!” he barked, and twelve guns bellowed as one.

  The French seventy-four Achille quivered as more iron crashed into her, and rattling drums sent gun crews dashing from larboard to starboard. They cast off breech ropes, fighting to get their guns into action, but eh hidden battery had taken Achille utterly by surprise, and men shouted in panic as flames began to lick from the red-hot metal buried in her timbers. Bucket parties tried desperately to douse the fires, but the surprise was too great, time was too short … and the British aim was too good. Not one shot had missed, and panic became terror as woodsmoke billowed. The flames that followed were pale in the bright sunlight, but they roared up the ship’s tarred rigging like demons, and the horrible shrieks of men on fire, falling from her tops, finished off any discipline she might have clung to.

  Officers shourted and beat at mean with the flats of their swords, battling to restore order, but it was useless. In less than six minutes, Achille went from a taut, efficient warship to a doomed wreck whose terror-crazed crewmen flung themselves desperately into the water even though most had never learned to swim.

  Achille’s next astern, the sixty-eight Justice, managed to clear away her starboard guns, but the battery’s earthen rampart easily absorbed her hasty broadside, and then the British guns thundered back. Every naval officer knew no ship could fight a well-sited shore battery, and Hastings smiled savagely as he and his men set out to demonstrate why.

  “Captain Somer’s compliments sir, and the enemy have been beaten off!”

  The fourteen-year-old midshipman was breathless from his rapid climb up Torbay’s side, and the seamen in his boat slumped over their oars, gasping after their long, hard pull, but every one of them wore a huge grin, like an echo of the cheers which had gone up from each ship as the boat swept by her.

  “The battery burned two of the line, sir—a seventy-four and a sixty-eight,” the midshipman went on, “And a third ran hard aground trying to wear ship in the channel. Two more came into Russel’s range while working their way clear—one of them lost her mizzen—and the frigate was heavily damaged on her way out.”

  “That’s excellent news!” Paul told the panting youngster. “The first lieutenant will detail fresh oarsmen to return you to Russel, where you will present my complements to Captain Somers and Lieutenant Hastings and tell them they have earned both my admiration and my thanks, as have all of their officers and men.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” The midshipman’s smile seemed to split his face, and Paul waved for Gaither to take him in tow, then turned to gaze out towards the open sea once more.

  He’d seen the French straggling back out past the capes, just as he’d seen the smoke of the burned vessels … and heard their magazines explode. Whatever else might happen, de Grasse had leaned he would not take Chesapeake cheaply. Yet the French also knew about the northern battery now. They wouldn’t try that approach a second time—especially not if the wind backed around to the east.

  No, if they come again, they’ll try the south or the center—or both, he told himself, turning to watch the sun
slide steadily down the western sky. And when they come, they’ll come to fight, not simply maneuver around us.

  He gazed out over the water, hands clasped behind him as the setting sun turned the bay to blood, and sensed the buzz of excitement and pride which enveloped Torbay and all his other ships. They’d done well, and at small price—so far—and he wondered how many of them even began to suspect how that would change with the morrow.

  This time he climbed the mainmast himself. He’d always had a good head for heights, but it had been years since he’d gone scampering to the tops himself, and he found himself breathing hard by the time he finally reached the topmast crosstrees.

  A hundred and eighty feet, he thought, recalling the formula he’d learned so long ago as he glanced down at the deck, still wrapped in darkness below him. Eight-sevenths times the square root of the height above sea level in feet makes … fifteen miles’ visibility? That was about right, and he hooked a leg around the trestle and raised his telescope.

  His mouth tightened. The wind had, indeed, backed further around to the east. Now it blew almsot due west, and it appeared de Grasse had made up his mind to use it. French warships and transports dotted the brightening sea as far as Paul could see, but what drew his attention like a lodestone was the double column of ships-of-the-line; sixteen of them in two unequal lines, heading straight into the bay on a following wind.

  He studied them carefully, making himself accept the sight, then closed the glass with a snap and reached for a backstay. Perhaps it was bravado, or perhaps it was simply the awareness that a fall to his death had become the least of his worries, but he swung out from the crosstrees, wrapped his legs around the stay, and slid down it like some midshipman too young and foolish to recognize his own mortality.

  He sensed his officer’s astonishment as his feet thumped on the planking, though it was still too dark on deck to see their faces. His hands stung from the friction of his descent, and he scrubbed them on his breeches while his steward hurried up with his coat and sword. Then he turned to Lieutenant Gaither with an expression which—if Gaither could see it—would warn him to make no comment on the manner of his descent.

  But it wasn’t the lieutenant who commented.

  “Did y’see that, boyos?” a voice called from the dimness of the ship’s waist. “Just full o’high spirits and jollification ‘e is!”

  Divisional officers hissed in outrage, trying to identify the speaker. But lingering night shielded the culprit, and their failure to find him emboldened another.

  “Aye! ‘E’s a dandy one, right enough! Three cheers fer the Cap’n, lads!”

  Paul opened his mouth, eyes flashing, but the first cheer rang out before he could say a word. He leaned on the quarterdeck rail, peering down at the indistinct shapes of gunners naked to the waist in the dew-wet dimness while their wild cheers surged about him like the sea, and all the while sixteen times their firepower sailed toward them through the dawn.

  It ended finally, and he cleared his throat. He gazed down at them as the rising sun picked out individual faces at last, and then straightened slowly.

  “Well!” he said, “I see this ship will never want for wind!” A rumble of laughter went up, and he smiled. But then he let his face sober and nodded towards the east.

  “There’s more than a dozen Frogs out there,” he told them, “and most of ‘em will be about our ears in the next hour.” There was silence now, broken only by a voice repeating his words down the gratings to the lower gundeck. “It’s going to be hot work, lads, but if we let them in, the Army will be like rats in a trap. So we’re not going to let them in, are we?”

  For an instant he thought he’d gone too far, but then a rumbling roar answered him.

  “No!” it cried, and he nodded.

  “Very well, then. Stand to your guns, and be sure of this. This is a King’s ship, and so long as she floats, those colors”—he pointed at the ensign fluttering above Torbay—“will fly over her!”

  The two French lines forges past Cape Henry, and Paul watched their fore and main courses vanish as they reduced to fighting sail. The six ships of the shorter column passed as close to the cape as they dared, bound for Lynnhaven Roads in an obvious bid to sweep up and around the southern end of his line, but the other ten pressed straight up the channel between the Middle Ground and the Tail of the Horseshoe.

  He paced slowly up and down his quarterdeck, watching them come, feeling the vice of tension squeeze slowly tighter on his outnumbered men. Torbay quivered as Gaither took up a little more tension on the spring, keeping her double-shotted broadside pointed directly at the leasing Frenchman and Paul frowned as he estimated the range.

  Two thousand yards, he thought, Call it another twenty minutes.

  He paused and turned his eyes further south, where the other French column was now coming abeam of Cape Henry.

  Any time, now …

  A brilliant eye winked from the still-shadowed western side of the cape, and the ball howled like a lost soul as it crossed the bow the massive three-decker leading the French line. A white plume rose from the bay, over five hundred yards beyond her—which meant she was well within reach of Lieutenant Jansen’s guns—and then a long, dull rumble swept over the water as two dozen thirty-two-pounders bellowed.

  Screaming ironshot tore apart the water around the French ship, and Paul’s hands clenched behind him as her foremast thundered down across her deck. She staggered as the foremast dragged her main topgallant mast after it, and a second and third salvo smashed into her even as she returned fire against the half-seen battery. Smoke curled up out of the wreckage as the heated shot went home, or perhaps a coil of tarred cordage or a fold of canvas had fallen across one of her own guns as it fired. It hardly mattered. What mattered was the sudden column of smoke, the tongues of flame … and the French squadron’s shock.

  Despite the distance, it almost seemed Paul could hear the crackling roar of the French ship’s flaming agony, and Jansen shifted target. Smoke and long-range made the second ship a difficult mark, but her captain was no longer thinking of difficulties the defenders might face. His squadron had lost two ships-of-the-line to fire the day before; now a third blazed before his eyes, and he altered course, swinging desperately north to clear the battery.

  But in his effort to avoid the guns, he drove his ship bodily onto a mud bank. The impact shipped the mainmast out of her, and the entire line came apart. Choking smoke from the lead ship cut visibility, deadly sparks threatened anyone who drew too close with the same flaming death, and the second ship’s grounding made bad worse. If one of them could run aground, then all of them could … and what if they did so where those deadly guns could pound them into tiery torches?

  It was the result Paul had hoped for, thought he’d never dared depend upon it. But even as the southern prong of the French thrust recoiled, the northern column continued to close, and he studied his enemies almost calmly. Did they intend to attempt to pass right through his line? The width of the channel had forced him to anchor his ships far enough apart to make that feasible, but such close action was against the French tradition, and getting there would allow his ships to rake them mercilessly as they approached. On the other hand—

  He shook himself and drew his sword, watching the range fall, and the entire ship shivered as her guns ran out on squealing trucks. Each gun held two roundshot—a devastating load which could not be wasted at anything but point-blank range, and he didn’t even flinch as the lead ship’s bow chasers fired. Iron hummed over the quarterdeck, and he felt the shock and heard the screams as a second shot thudded into Torbay’s side and sent lethal hull splinters scything across her lower gundeck. Another salvo from the chasers, and a third. A fourth. The range was down to sixty yards, closing at a hundred feet per minute and then, at last, his sword slashed the air.

  “Fire!” Lieutenant Gaither screamed, and whistles shrilled and Torbay heaved like a terrified animal as her side erupted in thunder.

 
; “That’s the best I can do here, Captain,” Doctor Lambert said pointedly as he tied the sling. The implication was plain, but Paul ignored it. A French Marine’s musket ball had smashed his left forearm, and he feared it would have to come off. But for now the bleeding had mostly stopped, and he had no time for surgeons with three of Torbay’s seven lieutenants dead and two more, including Gaither, wounded.

  At least Lambert is a decent doctor—not a drunkard like too many of them, he told himself as he waved the man away. The doctor gave him an exasperated look, but he had more than enough to keep him occupied, and he took himself off with a final sniff.

  Paul watched him go, then looked along the length of his beautiful, shattered ship. It wasn’t like the French to force close action. They preferred to cripple an opponent’s rigging with long-range fire, but these Frenchmen seemed not to have know that.

  Darkness covered the carnage, but Paul knew what was out there. De Grasse’s northern column had sailed straight into his fire. Some of its ships had closed to as little as fifty yards—one had actually passed between Torbay and Prince William before letting go her own anchor—and the furious cannonade had raged for over four hours, like a cyclone of iron bellowing through a stinking, blinding pall of powder smoke. At one point both of Torbay’s broadsides had been simultaneously in action with no less than three French ships, and Paul doubted that all of the survivors of this line together could have mustered sufficient intact spars for a single ship.